NEWS ARCHIVES

Newsletters
2011	2010	2009	2008	2007	2006

• Congratulations to the recipients of the 2011 CBI Awards in Scientific Communication! Student Press Release Awards went to David Griffin, Adriana Kita and Fabian Romano Chernac; Charley Swofford won the Student Chalk Talk Award; Joanne Lau and Luis Ramirez-Tapia won the prizes for Best CBI Molecules! (8/11)
• 2011 Career Day Highlights (7/11)
• Congratulations to Elih Velazquez and Yadilette Rivera-Colón, winners of the 2011 Joint Retreat poster prizes! (6/11)
• Rotello group's work on Colorimetric Bacteria Sensing (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2011, 133, 9650-9653) is highlighted on 22 News (6/28/11)
• Alejandro Heuck is named John Adams Investigator for work on a Translational Research Collaboration Grant with Dr. Nagendra Yadava (PVLSI) and Seahorse Biosciences (6/11)
• Hardy group and colleagues develop a Caspase Activatible-GFP apoptosis "reporter" (6/11)
• Muthu provides seminal reference on many biological processes in his new book, Polymer Translocation (5/11)
• Surita Bhatia and Sue Roberts devlop oxygen-rich alginate wound dressings to improve recovery (3/11)
• Thai honored as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for contributions to supramolecular polymer chemistry (3/11)
• Peyton group builds tissue models from polymers to study killer diseases (3/11)
• Beena Krishnan and Lila M Gierasch publish Dynamic local unfolding in the serpin α-1 antitrypsin provides a mechanism for loop insertion and polymerization in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology (1/11)
• Neil Forbes publishes review, “Engineering the perfect (bacterial) cancer therapy”, in the Nature Reviews (Cancer)(Vol 10 No 11)
• Congratulations to the recipients of the CBI Award in Scientific Communication! Student Press Release Awards went to Fabian Romano Chernac (Heuck Lab) and Whitney Stoppel (Roberts Lab); Mariel Feliciano (Chambers Lab) and Daniel Sayut (Sun Lab) won the Student Chalk Talk Award (8/10)
• A warm welcome to the three new CBI Faculty Members:
  • Min Chen, Chemistry
  • Shelly Peyton, Chemical Engineering
  • Elizabeth Vierling, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
• Congratulations to Peter Chien on the arrival of son Thomas Flanagan Chien on August 23, 2010!
• Maria Santore selected as member of the 2010 class of Fellows of The American Chemical Society, and will be honored at a special ceremony during the ACS National Meeting in Boston on August 23, 2010
• Anne Gershenson (PI), Lila Gierasch and Dan Hebert (co-PIs) awarded a highly competitive and prestigious NIH EUREKA grant for "Post-Reductionist Protein Folding: Determining the In-cell Folding Energy Landscape of a Serpin" (7/10)
• Richard Vachet elected to board of directors of American Mass Spectrometry Society (7/10)
• Congratulations to the 2010 BMB/BMP/CBI Joint Retreat poster winners: Daniel Keifenheim, Kristina Moody Giorda, Tina T. Nguyen and Satamita Samanta; and to the volleyball champs on the Garman/Vachet team (5/10)
• Career Day - May 18, 2010
  
  • Poster
  • Highlights
• Bioengineering and life sciences research cluster including Professors Roberts, Henson, Bhatia, Forbes, approved to move into a new state-of-the-art building (5/10)
• Thai interviewed about solar technology research on WFCR (5/10)
• Maria Santore recieves a three year grant for a family travel initiative (5/10)
• Bob Weis and former graduate students Anthony Shrout and David Montefusco patent a method for assembling receptor-signaling complexes for engineering new compounds and drugs (5/10)
• Vince Rotello improving delivery of anti-cancer nanoparticle chemotherapy appears in Nature Nanotechnology (4/10)
• Thai's recent publication in the Journal of Polymer Science Part A: Polymer Chemistry (4/10)
• Thai and collegues' discovery of how to move protons and improve hydrogen fuel cell technology reported in Nature Chemistry (4/10)
• Greg Tew awarded the American Chemical Society Division of Polymer Chemistry 2010 Polymer Division Fellowship at the ACS Spring Meeting in San Francisco (3/10)
• Thai's key article on photovoltaics was chosen for the recent JACS Select on Harnessing Energy for a Sustainable World (3/10)
• Vince Rotello chosen by the ACS to receive one of two 2010 Langmuir Lectureship Awards for his cutting-edge research (3/10)
• Garman lab in the news: "UMass Amherst Biochemists Provide New Key for Treating Fabry Disease, a Rare Childhood Disorder" (2/10)
• Lila Gierasch receives Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin award (Genetech) for using biophysical methods to study biological systems, and will be honored at the Protein Society's Annual Symposium
• Craig Martin and Xiaoqing Liu discover how cells create stability during critical DNA-to-RNA transfers (12/09)
• Vince Rotello recognized for “distinguished contributions to supramolecular chemistry, particularly the use of nanoparticles in self-assembly and sensing” (12/09)
• Neil Forbes' research on cancer cure by bacteria featured in NPR (12/09)
• Danny Schnell selected to present the 2009 Nathan Edward Tolbert Endowed Lectureship in Plant Biochemistry, "Protein trafficking to chloroplasts: Mechanism and role in plastid development, "at Michigan State University (11/09)
• Congratulations to Eugenia and Alejandro--Linus Juan Heuck was born 11/3!
• Lila Gierasch receives supplement to use a computational model to explore how proteins utilize the Hsp70 molecular chaperone network to achieve their proper folded state
• Dan Hebert's grant for Cellular Protein Maturation and Degradation, aimed at understanding how proteins fold and mature in mammalian cells, and how the cell evaluates and discards improperly matured proteins, renewed
• Sue Roberts, Elsbeth Walker (Bio) and Jennifer Normanly (BMB) establish a Taxol™ consortium that applies molecular biology approaches to characterizing and manipulating Taxus metabolism for production of the anti-cancer agent paclitaxel (Taxol™)
• Craig Martin named Department Head of Chemistry
• UMass Amherst awarded $7 million in NIH stimulus funds to create shared lab and instrument space and build two new labs in Lederle. Jennifer Normanly (BMB) recognizes CBI Program as catalyst for project aimed at strengthening collaborations: "This proposal grew directly out of a really terrific training program known as the Chemistry Biology Interface that we’ve had in place for 15 years" (9/09)
• CBI receives additional Trainee Slot through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009!
• Congratulations to Min Chen and Matt Holden on new baby, Neil Chen Holden! (9/09)
• Cornelius Taabazuing, formerly an undergrad student in the Schnarr lab, spent the summer working with Nobel Laureate Tom Cech (8/09)
• Image developed by members of the Thai Group featured in JACS Image Challenge (8/09)
• Jeanne Hardy appears on EcoExchange WGBY for work with CCI (8/09)
• Please welcome the newest addition to Surita Bhatia's family, Evan Arjun Khalifah! He was born July 19, 2009, and weighed in at 9 lbs 14 oz.
• Welcome Peter Chien (BMB) and Matt Holden (Chem) the newest CBI faculty (7/09)
• Vince Rotello, Joe Jerry and colleagues' work "Detection and differentiation of normal, cancerous, and metastatic cells using nanoparticle-polymer sensor arrays" featured in PNAS (6/09)
• Brad Pearse (Hebert Lab) won a gift certificate to Pasta E Basta for his poster, “Loss of the ER Quality Control Aensor GT1 Results in Mislocalization of an Endogenous Aubstrate to Intracellular Deposits,” at the Joint Retreat (6/09)
• Antonio Viana (Schnell Lab) won a gift certificate to Pasta E Basta for his poster, “Determinants for stop-transfer and post-import pathways for protein targeting to the chloroplast inner envelope membrane,” at the Joint Retreat (6/09)
• Lila Gierasch elected to the Nominating Committee of the American Peptide Society (Sp/09)
• Gregory Tew received a $100,000 Grand Challenges Explorations grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support a global health research project exploring how synthetic AMOs interact with the immune system (5/09)
• Thai's research on three-part polymer featured in Chemistry World (5/09)
• Alejandro Heuck selected to be the 2009 Diseases of Infants and Children Scholar by the American Lung Association (5/09)
• Mike Maroney awarded a College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Outstanding Faculty Award in the area of research (5/09)
• Dan Hebert awarded a College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Outstanding Faculty Award in the area of research (5/09)
• Lila Gierasch and Rob Smock write "Sending Signals Dynamically" featured as the cover story in the April 10 issue of the journal Science (4/09)
• CBI Trainee Mariel Feliciano featured in UMass news article discussing the use and importance of both chemistry and biology for studying memory in the Chambers lab (4/09)
• Scott Garman receives University Distinguished Teaching Award, which "recognizes and honors individual excellence" in teaching across the university (4/09)
• Vince Rotello and Bappaditya Samanta's work, "Magnetic Nano-'shepherds' Organize Cells," featured in Science Daily (4/09)
• Craig Martin awarded a $45,000 special grant from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation to create a 'Molecular Playground' for ISB (3/09)
• "Amphiphilic nanoassemblies for the detection of peptides and proteins using fluorescence and mass spectrometry" by R. Vachet, Thai, M. Azagarsamy, A. Gomez-Escudero, and V. Yesilyurt, featured in RSC's Analyst (3/09)
• Thai lab's work, "Sensitive polymers show drug delivery promise", featured in Chemistry World, Royal Society of Chemistry (3/09)
• The most accessed paper of 2008 in Advanced Materials was “Applications of Nanoparticles in Biology,” by V. Rotello, M. De and P. Ghosh (2/09)
• INDUSTRY & SYMPOSIUM EVENTS 2009
• Frontiers of Cellular Imaging Symposium
  Monday, May 11, 2009
  
• Industry Seminar, Life Technologies
  Monday, April 13 at 2:45
  Gunness Student Center (Marcus Hall)
  Featuring Dr. Steven Menchen, Life Technologies (formerly Applied Biosystems) “New technologies for high throughput DNA Sequencing”
• Pharma Careers Discussion Panel
  Thursday, April 9 at 2:15
  ISB 221
  Consisting of Tomi Sawyer, Adjunct UMass Chemistry Professor/Senior Vice-President, Drug Discovery & Innovative Technologies, Aileron Therapeutics; Pat Walters, Senior Research Fellow at Vertex Pharmaceuticals; Jeanne Hardy, UMass Chemistry Professor formerly with Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; and Ray D'Alonzo, UMass Chemistry Professor retired from Procter & Gamble.
  


• Vince Rotello Appointed Associate Editor for North America for the Journal of Materials Chemistry (12/08)
• Lila Gierasch and Beena Krishnan featured in Chemistry and Biology for developing a way to slip a fluorescent marker into a cell’s molecular machines so it lights up when it has formed the proper shape to carry out the cell’s “work orders” (10/08)
• Chalk Talk Schedule for 2008-09
• A warm welcome to the two newest CBI faculty members, Jim Chambers and Nate Schnarr